“Years ago we stated our intention to support DX12, but since the introduction of Vulkan which has the same feature set and performance advantages this seemed a much more logical rendering API to use as it doesn’t force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 and opens the door for a single graphics API that could be used on all Windows 7, 8, 10 & Linux,” explains Director of Graphics Engineering Ali Brown. “As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn’t effect any of our backers. DX12 would only be considered if we found it gave us a specific and substantial advantage over Vulkan. The API’s really aren’t that different though, 95% of the work for these APIs is to change the paradigm of the rendering pipeline, which is the same for both APIs.”

Brown also addresses a complaint that “CIG is avoiding the most important questions” and says that the game’s “dedicated systems for asteroids & debris we can already handle over 100,000 individually moving objects on screen at well over 60fps” bolstered by “an imposter system to handle the visualization of millions more in the background.”

I realize that when Star Citizen/Squadron 42 is released, I’ll be selling my account. I won’t be able to afford buying a computer that will run it in 2 years. The switch to Vulkan means that my computer now won’t run it…I have the wrong graphics card and my system is too old. I guess I’ll have to start playing the other 25 games I haven’t started that run fine on my system.

Vulkan won’t make the game unplayable…. and it run fine today with an I5 quadcore 3.4 and a GTX 780. Only Netcode is a problem to have smooth gameplay in PU but otherwise in arena commander and SM it is perfect.

Many of the newest computer games I’ve bought include the Vulkan API alongside the Direct X API.

By creating Star Citizen around the Vulkan API, CIG effectively frees Star Citizen from a reliance on Windows and Microsoft in order to run,

This opens the door for simpler ports of SC for gamers using Apple or Linux desktop systems, for example

For the longest time, desktop computer games were effectively bound to the Direct X API if they used advanced graphics and/or graphics cards, and the Direct X API is the intellectual property of Microsoft.

Any perceived attempts to “reverse engineer” Direct X into something more “open source” were met with litigation.

The Vulkan API essentially arrived at a similar functionality through a different path, so the threat of legal smiting never materialized.

Vulkan basically allows developers to create desktop computer games without automatically binding those games to the Windows operating system.

This is a very smart decision, and shows they are focused on making Star Citizen a game with a long future, free of platform-specific bindings. That includes, I’m guessing, ditching Windows entirely at some point.

You surely can’t be serious. Why would you ditch the vast majority of gamers who don’t play on consoles or mobile? Are you suggesting Star Citizen’s future is consoles and mobile? Because it sure isn’t Linux or Mac.

He said ” free of platform-specific bindings”. What is the point about console and mobile?
Can be used on Mac, Linux and older or newer Windows…. hence more than only Win10. That is a pretty clever move indeed.

“We will begin coding a new in house game engine next week. We expect it will take 4 years to complete, by which time it will be obsolete. In the meantime, we’ve put a new ship in the online store…the Vapoware-32X for only $200. Snap them up while you can, because they are a limited quantity digital ship!”

DX just works, people can hate on Microsoft all they like, but the fact remains that DX is currently the best of the bunch. Just like for most people, Windows is the most logical choice for an OS to use on their computers. Oh sure people might like the idea of Linux, the open source dream, but in reality Windows just works.

Better for what? Do you think senior developers like the one at Cloud Emperium will pick VUlkan just to gain a few thousands Linux players? Most players wont see a difference between VUlkan and DX12 but VUlkan can run on any OS… Guess what is the right move in terms of players base. A few thousands or 100.000″s. Again CR did the right move after Lumberyard.

“””IF Vulkan in fact outperforming DX11 right now, you can bet your ass MS will work assiduously to correct that.”””

I don’t think that is even possible. Not any more than Microsoft could make DX11 perform better than DX12.

Much of the performance gain comes from a different architecture, different ways of managing the graphics elements and hardware, in which Vulkan is very different from OpenGL and all D3D APIs before DX12.

As for whether DX12 will perform measurably better than Vulkan: I doubt it. I doubt the opposite would happen either. Both DX12 and Vulkan are too close to the metal for any meaningful performance difference to be felt, and if DX12 has Microsoft to make sure no issues crop up, in the case of Vulkan you have AMD, NVidia, and Intel collaborating in making sure it doesn’t hit any snags.

I can’t say that is wrong. However, my worry is that while both are close to the metal, the small part between them and the metal is written and owned by Microsoft. Whether they use that to “benefit consumers” or “unfairly” is personal opinion.

IMO, the heroes are NVidia and AMD. While Intel desktop CPUs have not been pushing performance, the graphics people continue to fight the good fight; at least the 1080 ti came out sooner/faster than I was expecting.

Boo. Hiss. DX always better than the OS alternatives. The geeks with more smarts than sense have apparently taken over.
“Gee guys, do we support the 90% or the 10%?”
“The Ten Percent!” they screamed in unison, clutching their lattes and Red Bulls.

Better for what? Do you think senior developers like the one at Cloud Emperium will pick VUlkan just to gain a few thousands Linux players? Most players wont see a difference between VUlkan and DX12 but VUlkan can run on any OS… Guess what is the right move in terms of players base. A few thousands or 100.000″s.
Again and once more, CR did the right move after Lumberyard.

DX12 better. Geez, even LOTRO supports DX11. But really my point is, how many people are going to use Vulkan knowingly and willingly over DX11/12, when they will all be using Win10 anyway? The Linux gaming base is a tiny fraction of gaming. Android gaming dwarfs Linux gaming by many magnitudes. PC gaming means Windows, and Direct X!

DX12 and vulkan are basically based off the same “base” teh problem and the large reason that most developers decided against openGL had nothing to do with performance constraints or features in any way shape or form. The problem came down to the coding toolsets for both openGL and directX in the past. OpenGL’s tools were abysmal versus directX the same cannot be said of vulkan thus far as DX12 and vulkan take the same amount of work put in heavily to actually optimize a game for them (being closer to metal/lower level apis)

Everything you can do in DX12 you can do in Vulcan, with performance so close you need detailed benchmarks to notice the difference. Without being told which API is being used the player simply can’t tell them apart at all.

For the devs, the complexity seems to be similar; both are equally easy (or hard) to use. The difference is in which platforms support each; DX12 means their app runs on Windows 10 and XBox (they need a different graphics pipeline to do previous versions of Windows), Vulcan means all Windows versions from 7 onward, Linux, Mac, Android, with a good chance of PS4 adding Vulcan support down the line. This not only means more publishing options with Vulcan, but also a larger pool of programmers to hire.

In the specific case of Star Citizen, going with Vulcan means adding Linux, Mac, Windows 7, and Windows 8 support much more cheaply than if they chose DX12, while their Windows 10 players shouldn’t be able to tell the game isn’t running on DX12 anyway. Sounds like win-win for me, a no-brainer unless Microsoft goes back on their promises and adds DX12 to all Windows versions from 7 onward.

i spent a half hour looking for dx12 vs vulkan benchmarks and couldn’t find any because no game uses both dx12 and vulkan.

which in games that use both dx11 and vulkan, dx11 outperforms vulkan mode readily even on amd cards which have shit poor dx11 driver optimization.

and why would ms give more mainstream support to windows 7? it’s well past EOL for a while now. it’s become winxp 2.0.

nevermind that it’s unlikely any modern hardware will be supported on win7 by the time star citizen comes out, rendering CIGs promise to push the envelope on cutting edge hardware usage moot. not that it’s not already looking that way anyway.

Win 10 has an abysmally low conversion rate..its 10% of the OS market ( and they gave it away for free) vs 49 % that have Win 7 today, Microsoft is desperately trying to get people to switch and announcing early that they aren’t supporting new proc ( that intel kaby lake and AMD bristol ridge going forward) the previous procs will cont to be supported.) Its going to be another 5 to 10 years before the majority of people switch from Win 7. to whatever OS Microsoft will be selling by then ( It probably won’t be Win 10 anymore) new PC’s come with the latest microsoft OS ,but people have been holding on to their “Good enough” computers for the last 5 year or more. Dev make games for whatever OS is most popular not what “newest” and least popular.

Honestly, that’s more on Apple than on game developers at this point. Steve Jobs despised video games and that seeped into the culture at Apple. Many game developers have had a very difficult time getting substantial support from Apple; whereas support from Microsoft has always been readily available for those developers.

Now this has shifted a bit since the introduction of the iPhone, as much of the early sales were pushed by being able to play video games on your phone. However, there are other issues like Apple’s complete control of hardware drivers (limiting optimization); and the fact that most of their units, even “desktops”, use laptop GPUs, which have pretty limited performance compared to their desktop brethren.

It very much is. Apple isn’t really supporting any newer API like vulkan and is cutting openGL support out as much as they can more and more in favor of their own languages so don’t expect to see apple gaming growing outside of using bootcamp etc.

I think “shifted a bit” is “a bit” of an understatement. Apple has more game revenue than EA. The Sept report I saw showed it within a couple of percentage points of Microsoft and growing 30% to Microsoft’s 5 so by now I assume Apple has more game revenue than Microsoft.

Ofc, that does not mean Apple will focus much on the legacy PC market and certainly a new Apple TV that plays iOS games sure seems more profitable development effort than PCs.

I was referring to the attitude towards core video games in general as having shifted a bit; and “a bit” is actually a fairly accurate assessment: while Apple’s support for developers on iOS has opened up a few support avenues for core gaming developers (aka PC games), OSX is still notoriously lacking in any substantial support for game development.

Well for as long as Apple computer’s main horrifically expensive, rigid and unable to be upgraded with custom hardware, it won’t be an operating system for anyone other than graphic designers and bloggers.

Years ago we stated our intention to support DX12, but since the introduction of Vulkan which has the same feature set and performance advantages this seemed a much more logical rendering API to use as it doesn’t force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 and opens the door for a single graphics API that could be used on all Windows 7, 8, 10 & Linux. As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn’t effect any of our backers. DX12 would only be considered if we found it gave us a specific and substantial advantage over Vulkan. The API’s really aren’t that different though, 95% of the work for these APIs is to change the paradigm of the rendering pipeline, which is the same for both APIs.

Hardly seems like an issue. if anything it will allow native Linux users better access to the game, should they go this route.

Apple doesn’t support vulkan at all. There is a method to do it that is third party, but yeah…. Apple is all about their metal API and unlikely a good move if they ever want games on it considering metal is on nothing but apple products.

Holy fuck, some of you guys. It’s just a change in graphics API, put the pitchforks away. Don’t like linux? Don’t use it. Don’t like Vulcan or Star Citizen? Instead of spewing your hate, ignore the article and move on. Jesus, it’s like your admitting your going to play the game so you want a reason to complain about it first. Shits getting old.

It’s funny because the Korean MMORPG market quite literally is the one actually pushing MMORPG graphics to higher levels. Most western MMORPGs have not pushed the graphics envelop of the genre forward at all. The best looking the west has to offer is ESO

It really makes sense. Why lock yourself into a Windows-only graphics system when there’s an open source alternative that’s just a good? DirectX was the better choice when the project started, but Vulkan provides equal performance and the potential for multi-platform support.

Also, from what I’ve been hearing from other game devs, upgrading your engine from DX11 to DX12 is almost as significant as switching to Vulkan instead. DX12 keeps some of the same interfaces as DX11, but most of the really big benefits come from writing your engine around the new features and interfaces anyway, which is a not insignificant amount of refactoring work if you’re starting from an existing engine

otherwise there’s no apples to apples benches dx12 vs vulkan out there, so taking CIG word as gospel here is silly. since they wouldn’t even know themselves until they implemented them both in star citizen and benchmarked the game running them.

asll vulkan being made by the same people who made openGL it’s quite likely going to end up having many of the same pitfalls which made openGL so unatttractive and painful for game developers for so many years.

which sure vilkan outperforms openGL in doom, but it’s not exactly hard to outperform opengl.

*sigh* you link that video, but I highly suspect you didn’t listen to it other than looking at the charts. Talos principal stated that the benches shown there are due to it being an early build and that performance is slower because of that. They said there is a point that it will end up performing better. Vulkan and DirectX 12 rely on the developers optimizing the games a lot more than say Nvidia or AMD do with DX11 where they release an optimized driver for a game.

Vulkan performs on par with DirectX 12 when both are implemented properly. You are using an early build of talos principal where they even state that the performance is lower with vulkan as your “method” of bad mouthing vulkan so just either go watch the full video and listen or GTFO and stop commenting about things you know nothing about.

Exactly my point since the beginning.
Every time some new shiny thing comes along, they’re quick to jump in and say “oh, and we’re doing that too” – procedural planets, frex – which often seem to be technologies or processes that involve FUNDAMENTAL rewrites to code and how it interacts with other modules so as to suggest another comprehensive re-write (no code is THAT modular).

There’s nobody that can objectively see that, at what is (supposedly) pretty late in the dev process, and not hearken back to Chris Roberts industry reputation as a guy with big ideas that can never discipline a project to delivery.

i’ve become convinced that the only reason we’ve seen legit progress on the game is becayse CR’;s brother erin and his established team got hired. from what we know CR is a guy that has no respect for chain of command and is impossible to bring down to earth, but his brother being his brother and all might be able to kind of tether him and keep him in check, while having continuous experience in game development since CR got pushed out the history and started playing at hollywood.

but the same issues that digital anvil had that saw CR pushed out of games are all evident here. and the fact the game is progressing development in legit ways the last year or two is really despite him in my mind.

which ideas guy trope is a funny one. i’m an ideas guy myself, it doesn’t mean that unless i have money to pay people to make my ideas happen they’ll ever happen. and got millions of people out there with similar great ideas for video games without any means to make them happen. just in this case CR happens to have connections and name recognition from back when he was more than just an idea guy. in CR’s case tho he regularly demonstrates he has no sense of any of this being practical or implementable or how the technology even works. this was a red flag from early on and continues to be one, but the fandom also has no idea so they thing these things are actually positives instead of red flags.

i’ve become convinced that the only reason we’ve seen legit progress on the game is becayse CR’;s brother erin and his established team got hired.

I can totally agree with that. He made an extremely good decision there and it’s unfortunate how long it took. But, credit where credit’s due, right?

in CR’s case tho he regularly demonstrates he has no sense of any of this being practical or implementable or how the technology even works.

He may not always be behind a monitor doing code these days but I think it’s fair to say he demonstrated a lot of technical understanding with his answers and explanations in a lot of AtV and 10for videos, as well as interviews and in person chats with the community.

i don’t think CR has done any real coding that wasn’t a photo op since the 90s to be quite frank. whenever he starts talking about tech what he has to say is down right bizarre.

and you don’t need to be a code monkey to understand limits or poly counts or any of that – pc gaming hardware enthusiasts live and breathe that stuff as a hobby.

anyways yes i think erin and his team deserve alot of the credit for pulling star citizen out of the development hell it was clearly in the first 2-3 years of development. the more i look at the progress of the client over the past year or so and think back to that kotaky article the more it seems to become clear.

the windows 7 support thing is odd. by the time this comes out there won’t be any support for it anymore from hardware makers. which gl getting driver updates from any motherboard maker for bugs on it for years now as it is, even on existign hardawre. let alone future hardware which intel and amd announced no chipset driver for it in the last some months on new hardware.

which believe it or not despite the ms hate memes that go around, absolutely no other operating system for any form factor is supported as long or as fully or as cheaply for the end user as windows. micorosoft’s windows support regime is objectively heads and shoulders more consumer friendly than any other os maker in the business.

anyways it’s also a bit odd to say vulkan and dx12 are so similar because from my compsci game dev buddies vulkan suffers from many of the same headaches as openGL did compared to dx in terms of learning it and implementing it even decently let alone optimally. which they all had a good laugh when valve posted examples of openGL running better than dx in their games, even before it was shown that valve’s own games in opengl on linux run worse than on windows unless you’re running a very specific distro that has a better optimized and non standard graphics stack. which is not to say dx12 doesn’t have a learning curve steeper than past dx versions but it’s certainly more livable than dealing with learning and implementing vulkan or so they say. which is the general rule of thumb with the open APIs versus the proprietary ones i’ve been told.

Don’t get me wrong, I like farting around with linux occasionally, but I think the zealot train left the station a long time ago.

It has some great uses (my webserver is apache, and I have dual-boot into linux on at least a couple of systems at home) but it’s still not quite ready for prime time and that’s always been “just a few years off”…since the late 90s at least.

And i would even disagree on desktop machines, the average user just uses what comes pre packaged with their machine and that’s it, the advanced user probably runs dual boot, when MS was worth a damn i didn’t have a dual boot MS/IBM desktop.

We’re at that point where tablets are starting to be an alternative to a PC for the average user, and guess what OS the average tablet uses?

i like to joke about android being linux based to my friends and they call me a retard for doing so. and they actually use linux as their daily driver OS so ummm yeah…

linux wasn’t a thing when “IBM compatable” computers were a thing either so that’s kind of a silly argument. there were plenty of different kinds of computers and os’s to go with them and not a single one of them dualbooted anything.

which it’s not so much dual booting into linux to do stuff (or into osx), but booting into windows to do stuff you cannt do well or at all on those other two OSs.

and ultimately as the company that spends their time and makes their money porting games to linux on steam have essentually said, the amount of users that actually play game that run on linux when they have linux installed is not worth the price of porting the games over because typically they just don’t play the games on linux even when they have everything set up to do so.

Ah, if people mock it then it must not be true, after all everyone that downloads Ubuntu is a Linux expert…

You missed my point, when MS had a top quality product no one was worried about alternatives, because they were fully satisfied, this is valid for both Windows and Office.

You have to differentiate between high and low level users, low level ones don’t care, they just want to plug in and use office, high end users are probably using virtual boxes and running Windows from Linux or vice-versa.

Had i heard good things about Windows 8 or 10 i would be using them, i use many MS software and have absolutely nothing against them, but i’m not a fan of the brand like you seem to be, if SC backtracks and says they will use dx12 after all because they concluded that it was the best for them, i will not have any problem with that, i just think it makes sense to go for the options that gives the most alternatives.

even tho i think it was kind of obvious i was referring to consumers and not enterprise.

but there have been public cases of governments who tried to save money by adopting linux and ended up causing them far more than windows with the cost of training employees and support costs both internal hiring proficient professionals and from the distro makers (which is how linux companies make money and it’s not cheap or a one time cost).

which linux isn’t really free in terms of costs no money, but rather in the sense of freedom with an asterisk.

so yes, windows is comparatively cheap both govs/business too compared to linux once you run the numbers in a practical fashion and identify the hidden costs of linux.

Even taking into account the €2.08 million for optimization and test management that ended up on the balance of the LiMux project, the LiMux system is cheaper than using a Windows installation, Ude noted. Upgrading the Windows systems to a level comparable to the LiMux infrastructure, including hardware needed to run the software, would have cost the city at least €15.52 million, he said.

The maximum number of complaints was 70 per month before the beginning of the switch to LiMux. After the number of LiMux workplaces increased from 1,500 to 9,500, the maximum number of complaints per month dropped to 46. This leaves Ude to conclude that the decline in complaints was due to the migration to LiMux.

The use of LiMux was called into question not long after its rollout. Complaints about compatibility, combined with the 2014 election of a Microsoft-favoring mayor, Dieter Reiter, first put the open source deployment in jeopardy. Reiter commissioned a report from consultants—including Microsoft partner Accenture—on IT policy. That report recommended giving staff a choice between Windows/Office and LiMux/LibreOffice. Should Windows and Office prove popular, the report said that the continued financial viability of supporting Linux should be investigated.

my german is a bit rusty but i’m failing to see the relevance of that collection of documents to this topic.

i’m not sure if you even bothered to look at what you linked there. >>

also one of the complaints of city workers is that the linux machines don’t properly read PDF files. LOL

fact remains that since munich initially switched over to linux which that mayor claimed saved them so many euroes, the switch has been fraught with ongoing problems at various levels and ongoing added costs, to the extent they are seriously considering switching to windows 10. 85% of their employees have complained about regular issues with the computers that impact their ability to do their jobs.

MASSIVELY OVERHEARD

“I think at the end of the day the game is gonna speak for itself, the content speaks for itself. There’s plenty of people who say, y’know, you can’t do certain things and I don’t listen to them. Especially, y’know, I mean, you have to listen to people who have actually been able to do stuff and that you respect. That’s not the case [here].”